I’m still not sure what to make of it since Sega sometimes do not commit to bringing in the really good stuff from Japan to the English speaking parts of the World (**sigh Yakuza 5 and Sakura Wars sigh). But at least it wasn’t Nintendo or Sony that bought Atlus, or even Microsoft. I’d hate to be locked into one console maker just to have access to Atlus’ franchises.
Who has the pic of Darth Vader yelling “Nooooooooooooooo” handy?
We could be optimistic, and hope that the impact goes the other way: Atlus will localize Sega’s smaller-market titles, and so we’ll get more of them brought across…
One can dream.
It’s possible they will not screw it up. I hope that either there isn’t an instant talent exodus, or that the talent exodus goes somewhere in particular instead of scattering hither and yon.
There’s a small chance Sega will be smart and use Atlus USA as their localization branch for games they normally won’t bring over here (and there’s a tiny amount of history here; Atlus USA published the DS version of Puyo Pop Fever waaaay back when), but given their usual responses even when presented with large amounts of fans asking for western releases of games (aside from Project Diva), I expect the last MegaTen game we’ll see in the west to be the one Nintendo’s actively involved with.
Given that Sega Sammy’s talked about restructuring Index, and given that they’ve talked about leveraging Index IPs for things like smartphone games, Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem might be the last real MegaTen game, period.
I really hope they don’t screw this up. Atlus is one of the few console developers left whose work I still look forward to.
But can you imagine Atlus developing Phantasy Star V?
If new parent company were one with reputation for leaving well enough alone, would’ve figured Atlus product line to be safe, since studio seems to have found its niche in past few years and appears to have been quite happy with it.
Hard to have faith in Sega as publisher, and would not be surprised to see new parent company attempt to shoehorn some if not most of Atlus’ efforts into mobile game development.
Hard to also not see exodus of some sort after smoke clears/options vest, followed by one or more Kickstarter/Indiegogo projects.
Gods, I hope you are wrong. This is like getting a kick in the nuts. No 'mo MegaTen???
Or Skies of Arcadia 2?
Presumably even Sega won’t derail Persona 5.
Maybe not, but they could attempt to rush its development and leave us with a shoddy product, or, again, not bring it to the west.
I would make a crack about them shoving DLC into it, but Index was probably going to make them do that anyway, as seen with Shin Megami Tensei IV.
Not Persona 5, surely. P4 must have made more money for Atlus than any other game they’ve ever sold. If they really want to make money, they’d localize it with higher priority than anything else. But yeah, they might rush it, I suppose, or some key people might flee to some other company and leave it in the lurch.
Just create 500 page petitions- it took one of those to get the last version of Virtua Fighter released on console.
I’m hoping Sega gets Atlus to make PC ports of console games.
That would require Atlus to develop console games, though. Remember that the only one they made this entire generation was Catherine; everything else they developed themselves was on handhelds, and there’s no reason that’ll change when handhelds are king over there (where dedicated game systems are concerned). No reason for them to do PC ports either when PCs are incredibly unpopular over there.
I have no problem with this at all - I was upset when SquEnix announced DQ IX for the DS only but that game turned out pretty well (of course, they just had to go screw things up by releasing X on Wii/online!). A handheld only P4 could work on the Vita and would actually be a reason enough for me to purchase one.
Of course, I’d prefer a next gen (or hell, even current gen!) Persona but I’m thinking Atlus will just waste all that power anyway and continue to give us simple (yet nicely stylized) graphics and barebones dungeons with repetitive scenery anyway. Just saying, I wouldn’t mind a handheld exclusive as they did with SMT IV.
PC ports are fairly cheap to make (I have friends who do PC ports of PSP games), and they do sell decently in the west- they usually make some money and don’t cost a lot of time/effort.
It’s not about Japan, it’s about the western market. A Persona game is going to do much better than say Ys Origin (which is pretty good but less name recognition)
There is one for the Vita. Its called Persona 4 Golden. Its allegedly the definitive version of Persona 4.
To be honest, I don’t really care what happens to Atlus USA. I mean, sorry for the lost jobs and all. That’s what the article is mainly about.
Now if Sega does decide to stop localizing Atlus-style games, that would be a shame. But as the article points out, Sega not only has plenty of localization resources of their own, but they’ve also created a separate subsidiary to manage the purchase. So it’s not necessarily the case they will just stop that kind of distribution.
As pointed out repeatedly across the video game-playing Internet, including in that article, Sega in recent years has refused to localize most of their non-Sonic Japanese games, with sequels to niche series like Valkyria Chronicles, Yakuza, and Puyo Puyo (if you Yakuza fans think you have it bad, there have been four distinct non-smartphone Puyo Puyo games since the last one we got in the west, nine and a half years ago) remaining Japan-only in favor of western-focused flops like Binary Domain and low-effort localizations like Super Monkey Ball and Project Diva F. It’s bad enough that Phantasy Star Online 2 (still not available in the west) has a fan-translated client for playing the Japanese version in English.
It’s not a matter of Sega deciding to stop localizing those games in the future; it’s a matter of them already having decided to do so, and those of us who play the games Atlus USA localizes being rightly afraid that we’re going to stop getting games we enjoy.